Role-playing games and video games can have quite a lot of jargon this page is a glossary that add some brief definitions and meanings for some of these obscure terms.
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a list of alphanumeric characters, punctuation etc defined as encoding where each character is represented by 7-bits but later using 8 bits. Text files are commonly formatted in ASCII, though the superset UTF-8 encoding is becoming the standard.
Attributes
Attributes are number that are used to describe something in the game world. Common examples are hit points and strength points associated with characters and creatures in the game. For an in-depth looks at attributes and how to implement them in game checkout this link.
Buff
In roleplaying games and video games, a buff describes an temporary enhancement or beneficial effect applied to a character, usually improving their attributes or skills for a limited time. A buff might expire after a certain duration or a buff may be related to some condition such as standing in a certain area or wearing some special equipment.
Class
A character class is an archetypes that modifies attributes, abilities, and role of a game character. Usually a class with also have thematic aspect that may impact your interactions in the world. i.e. If you’re Paladin game characters might treat in a different way than if you’re a Pirate for instance.
Classes may expand to things other than characters such as weapons, spells and so on.
See What Are Character Classes?.
Core Mechanic
A core mechanic is some aspect of how the game works that you, as the player, will be interacting with throughout your playtime. A good example is the materia system in Final Fantasy 7.
Critical Path
The minimum actions the player needs to take to complete the game.
That seems like a lot - and it is - but it’s necessary to keep a player engaged in our game and story for the 20+ hour critical path.
- Interview about Mass Effect
D&D
Dungeons and Dragons, the first tabletop roleplaying game published in 1974. Also see OD&D, AD&D.
DPS
Damage per second.
Experience Points
An abstraction to represent a character getting stronger or more experienced. In the original Dungeons and Dragons gold the player owner also contributed to experience. In modern systems you can spend the points to gain levels and skills.
Failure Spiral
Failure spiral or death spiral comes from aviation where a plane can enter a spiral that is hard to impossible to recover from and means the plane is going to crash. In a gameplay setting it means the player has entered a state where it’s guaranteed or very likely that they will die and there’s nothing to be done, it’s just a matter of time. These kind of states can be frustrating for players.
Game Engine
Games Engine are a core set of code that changes little from game to game. Often this code deals with low-level tasks such as displaying graphics, input and so on. The gameplay code lives on top of the engine and makes use of it to create the gameplay and game content. One of the very earliest games that could be considered to use a game engine is The Dunjonquest engine as first used by Temple of Apshai in 1979 and later games such as The Datestones of Ryn.
More modern game engines include the generic Unity and Unreal and then there are specific developer engine such as the Creation Engine for Skyrim.
Game Loop
Game loop is used in at least two different ways in the programming sense and in the game design sense.
Programming: The game loop in the programming sense is a loop that reads input, simulates the world and updates the view of the game, commonly a screen. You can get the details in the article How Do Games Work - that speaks about the game loop.
Design: A game-loop is some series of actions the player repeats in a game. A loop might be something like: Enter dungeon, kill monsters, get loot, return to surface and repeat.
Game Verbs
Verbs (also known as doing words) are used as a shorthand to describe the main actions you’ll be doing in the game. So Doom’s core verbs are running and shooting. An RPG like Skyrim will have exploring, fighting, picking locks and so on. Thinking about game design at this level abstraction helps understand what the gameplay is about and how it might be changed.
Games Master
In Dungeon and Dragons one player represents the game world itself, explaining the settings, playing the monsters and NPCs etc. They may also be called the Games Master or even Game Judge in the early days of table top roleplaying games.
Grind
Repeating an action beyond what would be considered reasonable for a player to gain some benefit. For instance one might grind levels by repeatedly killing the same monsters spawning early on in the game.
Historical Materialism
Historical Materialism is from Marx and describes a system of understanding the world though history and material conditions i.e. property, modes of production and the relationships those given rise to. For RPGs this term is mostly in used in regards to world building where economic and class factors have been considered when designing the game world and perhaps it’s plot.
You may have already guessed which game caused this term to enter the glossary, that’s right, Disco Elysium.
Hit Points
An abstraction to represent the health of a game entity. When hit points reach zero there’s some state change - usually the character dies. However hit points can also be put on doors and walls and so on and their state change usually ends with their destruction.
Commonly abbreviated to H.P.
Hit Stop
When the player lands a hit in combat the game or animations are paused for a short time to signal the hit was successful. Hit Stop is connected closely to the “sense of hitting” communicated to the player. Hit Stop is a technique the contributes to selling the hit to the player.
It gives a feeling of weight and meat to the hit. Hit Stop is only applied to the player character.
Hit Stop works by interrupting game flow, which makes the player immediately notice something special has happened and in this case, it’s that there was a hit and the short pause gives a little time for that to be registered. If the pause is too long it can be annoying for the player and feel like they’re no longer in control.
This technique comes from fighting games originally.
aka Hitstun/Hitfreeze/Hitlag/Hitpause
Hitboxes
A simplified representation of a part of a entity in the game that used to determine to do collision checks usually for combat. They exist for both 2D and 3D games. For 2D game checking pixel by pixel if a sword hits an enemies head can be costly but it’s quite cheap to check against a triangle and circle. The same for 3D games a 10k polygon monsters could be represented by 4 or 5 cubes are far easier to check against when seeing if a bullet hit or a sword strike.
Hitboxes are not only for collision-detection efficiency they are used for game design. During animation various hitboxes maybe turned on or off. For instance, for a sword attack animation, the sword hitbox maybe off for the wind-up of the attack and turn on when the attack begins. The same maybe true for doing dodge rolls and so on.
Hunger Clock
A hunger system that forces you to move forwards in the game to find food. aka. food clock. hunger, system.
Immersive Sim
A bit of journalese to describe games similar to Deus Ex.
Job
A job is similar to the concept of a character class however in most games a character class once chosen cannot be changed, whereas a job can be changed at anytime. While the player character has a job assigned, they can level up that job and this will unlock skills that remain available even after assigning a new job.
Two of the early users of a job system where Final Fantasy V (1992) and Final Fantasy Tactics (1997).
Late Game
Late Game refers to the part of the game near the end where the player has experienced a lot of the content the game has to offer and, in many RPGs, has become quite powerful. This part of the game often becomes hard to effectively balance because RPGs are quite freeform and allow players to skip or discover content and items that changes how powerful they are. If the game becomes too hard or easy at this point then it’s less satisfying to play.
Level Scaling
In open world games players can potentially go anywhere in the game world. They may wander into an area that’s way over their level. Some game designers consider this to be a problem to be solved and the solution is to scale all or some areas to the player characters current level. The might up or down. For instance a first level player might wander into a dragons layer and the game might see the level difference is significant and scale down the enemies in the layer. It can work the other way too. A high level player might have missed a cellar full of rats in the starting city and return to it when they’re very high level and the rats would be levelled scaled to the character’s current level.
It can also be solution to reduce the effectiveness of grinding levels, if the big bad boss is scaled to the current character level then purposively trying to gain levels to get an advantage works less well.
Magic Points
Commonly in RPGs magic points are spent to cast spells in many RPG magic systems. A character usually has a maximum amount of points and they spend from a pool that can be restored up to the maximum. Commonly abbreviated to M.P.
Mana
See magic points. Mana itself comes from the Polynesian word for spiritual life force. Find out more here.
Meta-knowledge
Knowledge that the player has but the player’s character could not be expected to know. For instance, having played the game before, a player might know there’s a secret door in the starting room with some cool loot and make a beeline for it. Whereas without that metaknowledge the player’s knowledge would have been the same as the characters that they would have to talk to later NPC to discover that early cache of loot.
It also refers a detailed knowledge of how combat mechanics work.
Metroidvania
A portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania. It describes a game that has the player navigating a non-linear maze-like world and discovering tools that allow new areas to be unlocked. Classically involves a lot of backtracking.
Mythic Underworld
The concept of a certain type of dungeon being almost a creature in itself and hostile to the player
a place where the normal laws of reality may not apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken. Not merely an underground site or a lair, not sane, the underworld gnaws on the physical world like some chaotic cancer. It is inimical to men; the dungeon, itself, opposes and obstructs the adventurers brave enough to explore it.
Coined by Jason Cone.
NPC
Non-playing character. Used to refer to characters in the game similar to the player but controlled by the computer. NPCs are commonly not aggressive to the player.
Overburdened
Games that track inventory weight often have a special overburdened character state when the amount of weight the character can carry is exceeded by the weight of the items they’ve picked up. The overburdened state may prevent the player from moving entirely, reduce or apply some similar effect to represent that the character is carrying too much.
PC
See Player Character.
PLATO
An early proto-internet and development system centered mainly around the University of Illions. It’s stands for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations and was originally developed as teaching but was used by students to make some of the very first computer role-playing games such as The Dungeon aka pedit5, Oubliette and Avatar.
Player Character
A in-game character that’s controlled by an out-of-game user, such as a person in the real world. Just using the world player can be confusing because it’s sometime used to mean the person using the console or computer, playing the game and sometimes for the avatar that represents them in the game world. I tend to use Player Character and User to make the distinction between the two.
Ports
To move a piece of software from one environment to another. Doom was originally written for IBM PC and later ported to other platforms such as the Nintendo 64. A simple port usually means a small amount of rewriting code, a more complicated port may require changing all the art assets and signficantly reworking code to work with different processors and memory constraints.
Power Fantasy
A term applied to books and film before it was also applied to gaming. It means the player enjoys that ability to become powerful in the game and that allows them to execute that power in a way that’s wouldn’t necessarily translate to the realworld or the life of the person player or reading a book, watching a movie.
Roguelike
A Roguelike is a game that emulates some traits of the game Rogue. As you might imagine, exactly which traits and to what degree a game must mimic these traits to be called a Roguelike is subject of much internet debate. Some of most important traits, at least to my mind, are permadeath, procedural generation, a wide variety of game choices that rewards tactical thinking and replayability.
See The Berlin Interpretation, for a fuller attempt at a definition.
Seeding Random Number Generator
Computers can generate pseudo-random numbers by using a function called a random number generator. This function is deterministic, so if you put in the number 1, for instance, you might get the random number back 5567. If you then call the function again and pass in the number 1, you’ll get 5567 back. But put in the number 2 and you get a new random number 81234. The seed is the number you’re choosing to start from. Then each subsequent random number you increment from that start point. This start point is also called the seed. A common seed number is the CPU tick time as it’s likely to be different per computer and every time it’s used. If you store a random number seed you can recreate procedural artifacts in a game such as generated dungeon layout.
Skill Check
This comes from Advance Dungeons and Dragon. One might try to lift a closing gate, or bribe a guard or something similar. In these cases the player roles a 20-sided dice and if the it’s lower that a certain number - strength for instance in the case of the gate - then they succeed. Modifier and additional dice might come in play depending on various experiences the player has had or how difficult the task they’re trying to do is.
In tabletop games this can very freeform, in CRPGs it has to preprogrammed.
Soulslike
A game like Dark Souls. The usual meaning is exploration punctuated by save points where you will respawn on death. These save points recover all your health when used but also restore all enemies you’d previous killed in the level. Other traits include realtime combat that’s high stakes and often a roll move and a stamina system that controls how often you can attack.
Spiderwebs
The small gaps that appear if the vertices of 3D art don’t quite match up and let the backgrounds seep in. This can also be floating point error when scaling and rotation are introduced.
Aka. seams
Stats
See attributes.
The Power Curve
As your characters level up they get more powerful. This makes harder game content more accessible. The power curve describes how different characters advance in power as they level up and what content in the game is a suitable match for their current powers.
Trap Choices
This term is occasionally used to describe how a game can let the player make bad choices during character creation or where you spend your spend skill points on levelling up.
If a fighter is worthless unless they max strength then why is that a choice? Josh Sawyer, Designer Notes 63, 10 January 2022
For instance if you can choose 4 skills and one skill is swimming, it’s a trap choice if your game features no swimmable water. Or if you investing Luck or a similar attribute but it’s used for nothing or very few things then it’s trap choice for the player and they’ve made a choice that’s always going to be bad.
Trash Fight
A battle with enemies that aren’t expect to cause a significant challenge. These can be used to pad the game, or give a journey in the game more sense of length, make the player feel like a bad ass etc.
Trash Mob
A small group of enemies that don’t pose a real threat to the player. Maybe the sole enemy in a trash fight.
TTRPG
Table Top Roleplaying Game the type of game that is played around a table (or remotely these days) sometimes with little miniatures representing the characters and monsters. A computer usually isn’t involved and the simulation of the game is shared between the players. The iconic example is Dungeon and Dragons.
Vancian Magic
The magic system used in D&D is based on a magic system invented by novelist Jack Vance. In the Dying Earth series of novels written in the 1940s where wizards need to memorize a spell to use it, which wipes itself from the caster’s mind after it was cast.
XP
See experience points.